Member-only story
That Time My Family Went into Hiding in Someone’s Basement
We thought white supremacists might be plotting an attack on our home
If there was one thing I prioritized in 2021, it was getting away. Every few months, I’d take the money we were saving by not buying or doing much, and I’d find a place to stay that was driving distance, out in nature, and not our house.
Of course, staying somewhere “out in nature” can be dicey for a multiracial family, but that was a risk we were willing to take.
As we were recently recounting fond memories from the trips we’d taken over the previous year, my six-year-old son piped up. “What about our trip to that man’s basement?” he asked.
Last January, nearly a year ago, we had indeed taken a “trip” to a man’s basement. To be clear, it wasn’t some cobwebbed, concrete-floor hovel. With two bedrooms, a bathroom, a large-screen TV, and carpet tiles, it was listed on AirBnb for $75 a night.
The apartment was about a 10-minute drive from our home, purposefully chosen for its proximity. My husband would still be commuting to his job. I would still be driving the kids to childcare in the morning and returning to the apartment to work.
This was not a planned vacation. We were laying low for a few nights because we didn’t feel safe in our house. There was a chance, we thought, that we might be the target of white supremacist violence.
It happened like this:
A couple of days before we arrived at what we affectionately dubbed The Mancave, I’d seen two white vans coming up our street. It was about 7:30 a.m., and I was leaving to drop off my kids at the in-home daycare where they spent the first year of Covid. My husband was already at work.
I noticed the white vans because our street is narrow, and I had to pull over to let them pass. I thought they were creeping along kind of slowly, and I thought it was weird that there were two of them in a row. In my rearview mirror, I noticed that they were pulling up near the front of our house. This was also weird. But I was running late, so I shrugged and told myself our neighbor must be getting some work done on her house. I continued driving.
